Year's Best Scifi 2 Part 29

Randy lies on the floor, sweating and s.h.i.+vering. His lips move but if he's muttering aloud, I can't hear it over the alarm. I tug on his arm. He doesn't resist and he doesn't help, just lies like a heavy dead cow.

There are no gurneys in Pathology. I slap him across the face, yelling "Randy! Randy! Get up!" Even now, even here, a small part of my mind thrills at hitting him.

His eyes open. For a second, I think he knows me. It goes away, then returns. He tries to get up. The effort is enough to let me hoist him over my shoulder in a fireman's carry. I could never have carried Jack, but Randy is much slighter, and I'm very strong.

But I can't carry him down three flights of stairs. I get him to the top, prop him up on his a.s.s, and shove.

He slides down one flight, b.u.mping and flailing, and glares at me for a minute. "For... G.o.d's sake...

Janet!"

His wife's name. I don't think about this tiny glimpse of his marriage. I give him another shove, but he grabs the railing and refuses to fall. He hauls himself-I'll never know how-back to a sitting position, and I sit next to him. Together, my arm around his waist, tugging and pulling, we both descend the stairs the way two-year-olds do, on our a.s.ses. Every second I'm waiting for the stairwell to blow up. Sean's gray face at dinner: f.u.c.king vigilantes'll get us all.

The stairs don't blow up. The firedoor at the bottom gives out on a sidewalk on the side of the hospital away from both street and parking lot. As soon as we're outside, Randy blacks out.

This time I do what I should have done upstairs and grab him under the armpits. I drag him over the gra.s.s as far as I can. Sweat and hair fall in my eyes, and my vision keeps blurring. Dimly I'm aware of someone running toward us.

"It's Dr. Satler! Oh my G.o.d!"

A man. A large man. He grabs Randy and hoists him over his shoulder, a fireman's carry a lot smoother than mine, barely glancing at me. I stay behind them and, at the first buildings, run in a wide loop away from the hospital.

My car is still in the deserted driveway across the street. Fire trucks add their sirens to the noise. When they've torn past, I back my car out of the driveway and push my foot to the floor, just as a second bomb blows in the east wing of the hospital, and then another, and the air is full of flying debris as thick and sharp as the noise that goes on and on and on.

Three miles along the East River Road, it suddenly catches up with me. All of it. I pull the car off the roadand I can't stop shaking. Only a few trucks pa.s.s me, and n.o.body stops. It's twenty minutes before I can start the engine again, and there has never been a twenty minutes like them in my life, not even in Bedford. At the end of them, I pray that there never will be again.

I turn on the radio as soon as I've started the engine.

"-in another hospital bombing in New York City, St. Clare's Hospital in the heart of Manhattan.

Beleagured police officials say that a shortage of available officers make impossible the kind of protection called for by Mayor Thomas Flanagan. No group has claimed credit for the bombing, which caused fires that spread to nearby businesses and at least one apartment house.

"Since the Centers for Disease Control's announcement last night of a widespread staphylococcus resistant to endozine, and its simultaneous release of an emergency counterbacteria in twenty-five metropolitan areas around the country, the violence has worsened in every city transmitting reliable reports to Atlanta. A spokesperson for the national team of pathologists and scientists responsible for the drastic countermeasure released an additional set of guidelines for its use. The spokesperson declined to be identified, or to identify any of the doctors on the team, citing fear of reprisals if-"

A burst of static. The voice disappears, replaced by a shrill hum.

I turn the dial carefully, looking for another station with news.

By the time I reach the west side of Emerton, the streets are deserted. Everyone has retreated inside. It looks like the neighborhoods around the hospital look. Had looked. My body still doesn't feel sick.

Instead of going straight home, I drive the deserted streets to the Food Mart.

The parking lot is as empty as everywhere else. But the basket is still there, weighted with stones. Now the stones hold down a pile of letters. The top one is addressed in blue Magic Marker: TO DR.

BENNETT. The half-buried wine bottle holds a fresh bouquet, chrysanthemums from somebody's garden. Nearby a foot-high American flag sticks in the ground, beside a white candle on a styrofoam plate, a stone crucifex, and a Barbie doll dressed like an angel. Saran Wrap covers a leather-bound copy of The Prophet. There are also five anti-NRA stickers, a pile of seash.e.l.ls, and a battered peace sign on a gold chain like a necklace. The peace sign looks older than I am.

When I get home, Jack is still asleep.

I stand over him, as a few hours ago I stood over Randy Satler. I think about how Jack visited me in prison, week after week, making the long drive from Emerton even in the bad winter weather. About how he'd sit smiling at me through the thick gla.s.s in the visitors' room, his hands with their grease-stained fingers resting on his knees, smiling even when we couldn't think of anything to say to each other. About how he clutched my hand in the delivery room when Jackie was born, and the look on his face when he first held her. About the look on his face when I told him Sean was missing: the sly, secret, not-my-kid triumph. And I think about the two sets of germs in my body, readying for war.

I bend over and kiss Jack full on the lips.

He stirs a little, half wakes, reaches for me. I pull away and go into the bathroom, where I use his toothbrush. I don't rinse it. When I return, he's asleep again.

I drive to Jackie's school, to retrieve my daughter. Together, we will go to Sylvia G.o.ddard's-Sylvia James's-and get Sean. I'll visit with Sylvia, and shake her hand, and kiss her on the cheek, and touch everything I can. When the kids are safe at home, I'll visit Ceci and tell her I've thought it over and I wantto help fight the overuse of antibiotics that's killing us. I'll touch her, and anyone else there, and everyone that either Sylvia or Ceci introduces me to, until I get too sick to do that. If I get that sick. Randy said I wouldn't, not as sick as he is. Of course, Randy has lied to me before. But I have to believe him now, on this.

I don't really have any choice. Yet.

A month later, I am on my way to Albany to bring back another dose of the counterbacteria, which the news calls "a reengineered prokaryote." They're careful not to call it a germ.

I listen to the news every hour now, although Jack doesn't like it. Or anything else I'm doing. I read, and I study, and now I know what prokaryotes are, and beta-lactamase, and plasmids. I know how bacteria fight to survive, evolving whatever they need to wipe out the compet.i.tion and go on producing the next generation. That's all that matters to bacteria. Survival by their own kind.

And that's what Randy Satler meant, too, when he said, "My work is what matters." Triumph by his own kind. It's what Ceci believes, too. And Jack.

We bring in the reengineered prokaryotes in convoys of cars and trucks, because in some other places there's been trouble. People who don't understand, people who won't understand. People whose family got a lot sicker than mine. The violence isn't over, even though the CDC says the epidemic itself is starting to come under control.

I'm early. The convoy hasn't formed yet. We leave from a different place in town each time. This time we're meeting behind the American Bowl. Sean is already there, with Sylvia. I take a short detour and drive, for the last time, to the Food Mart.

The basket is gone, with all its letters to the dead man. So are the American flag and the peace sign. The crucifex is still there, but it's broken in half. The latest flowers in the wine bottle are half wilted. Rain has muddied the Barbie doll's dress, and her long blonde hair is a mess. Someone ripped up the anti-NRA stickers. The white candle on a styrofoam plate and the pile of seash.e.l.ls are untouched.

We are not bacteria. More than survival matters to us, or should. The individual past, which we can't escape, no matter how hard we try. The individual present, with its unsafe choices. The individual future.

And the collective one.

I search in my pockets. Nothing but keys, money clip, lipstick, tissues, a blue marble I must have stuck in my pocket when I cleaned behind the couch. Jackie likes marbles.

I put the marble beside the candle, check my gun, and drive to join the convoy for the city.

Robert Sheckley

Robert Sheckley's reputation is based primarily on the quality of his quirky, subversive, satirical short fiction, a body of work admired by everyone from Kinsley Amis and J. G. Ballard to Roger Zelazny, with whom he has collaborated. He is on par with Philip K. d.i.c.k and Kurt Vonnegut as an ironic investigator of questions of ident.i.ty and of the nature of reality. Sheckley first came to prominence in the 1950s as one of the leading writers in Galaxy, became a novelist in the 1960s, and still (but too infrequently) produces fiction today that is thought-provoking, memorable, and stylish. This story is in his cla.s.sic Galaxy mode, and is another piece from the fine anthology, New Legends.

The Day The Aliens Came

by Robert Sheckley

One day a man came to my door. He didn't quite look like a man, although he did walk on two feet.

There was something wrong with his face. It looked as though it had been melted in an oven and then hastily frozen. I later learned that this expression was quite common among the group of aliens called Synesters, and was considered by them a look of especial beauty. The Melted Look, they called it, and it was often featured in their beauty contests. "I hear you're a writer," he said.

I said that was so. Why lie about a thing like that?

"Isn't that a bit of luck," he said. "I'm a story-buyer."

"No kidding," I said.

"Have you got any stories you want to sell?"

He was very direct. I decided to be similarly so.

"Yes," I said. "I do."

"OK," he said. "I'm sure glad of that. This is a strange city for me. Strange planet, too, come to think of it.

But it's the city aspect that's most unsettling. Different customs, all that sort of thing. As soon as I got here, I said to myself, 'Traveling's great, but where am I going to find someone to sell me stories?' "

"It's a problem," I admitted.

"Well," he said, "let's get right to it because there's a lot to do. I'd like to begin with a ten thousand word novelette."

"You've as good as got it," I told him. "When do you want it?"

"I need it by the end of the week."

"What are we talking about in terms of money, if you'll excuse the expression?"

"I'll pay you a thousand dollars for a ten thousand word novelette. I was told that was standard pay for a writer in this part of Earth. This is Earth, isn't it?"

"It's Earth, and your thousand dollars is acceptable. Just tell me what I'm supposed to write about."

"I'll leave that up to you. After all, you're the writer."

"d.a.m.n right I am," I said. "so you don't care what it's about?"

"Not in the slightest. After all, I'm not going to read it."

"Makes sense, " I said. "Why should you care?"I didn't want to pursue that line of inquiry any further. I a.s.sumed that someone was going to read it.

That's what usually happens with novelettes.

"What rights are you buying?" I asked, since it's important to be professional about these matters.

"First and second Synestrian," he said. "And of course I retain Synestrian movie rights although I'll pay you fifty percent of the net if I get a film sale."

"Is that likely?" I asked.

"Hard to say," he said. "As far we're concerned, Earth is new literary territory."

"In that case, let's make my cut sixty-forty."

"I won't argue," he said. "Not this time. Later you may find me very tough. Who knows what I'll be like?

For me this is a whole new frankfurter."

I let that pa.s.s. An occasional lapse in English doesn't make an alien an ignoramus.

I got my story done in a week and brought it in to the Synester's office in the old MGM building on Broadway. I handed him the story and he waved me to a seat while he read it.

"It's pretty good," he said after a while. "I like it pretty well."

"Oh, good," I said.

"But I want some changes."

"Oh," I said. "What specifically did you have in mind?"

"Well," the Synester said, "this character you have in here, Alice."

"Yes, Alice," I said, though I couldn't quite remember writing an Alice into the story. Could he be referring to Alsace, the province in France? I decided not to question him. No sense appearing dumb on my own story.

"Now, this Alice," he said, "she's the size of a small country, isn't she?"

He was definitely referring to Alsace, the province in France, and I had lost the moment when I could correct him. "Yes," I said, "that's right, just about the size of a small country."

"Well, then," he said, "why don't you have Alice fall in love with a bigger country in the shape of a pretzel?"

"A what?" I said.

"Pretzel," he said. "It's a frequently used image in Synestrian popular literature. Synestrians like to read that sort of thing."

"Do they?" I said.

"Yes," he said. "Synestrians like to imagine people in the shape of pretzels. You stick that in, it'll make it more visual."

"Visual," I said, my mind a blank."Yes," he said, "Because we gotta consider the movie possibilities."

"Yes, of course," I said, remembering that I got sixty percent.

"Now for the film version of your story, I think we should set the action at a different time of day."

I tried to remember what time of day I had set the story in. It didn't seem to me I had specified any particular time at all. I mentioned this.

"That's true," he said, "you didn't set any specific time. But you inferred twilight. It was the slurring sound of your words that convinced me you were talking about twilight."

"Yes, all right," I said. "Twilight mood."

"Makes a nice t.i.tle," he said.

"Yes," I said, hating it.